The Uplifters Try It Again -- HL Mencken

[DavidMS]

I found this old edtorial from the 1920s and thought I should post it. I think its beyond copywright, but I will only post 4 paragraphs.

http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/2nd_Amend/uplifters_try_it_again.htm

The eminent Nation announces with relish "the organization of a national committee of 100 to induce Congress to prohibit the inter-State traffic in revolvers," and offers the pious judgment that it is "a step forward." "Crime statistics," it appears, "show that 90% of the murders that take place are committed by the use of the pistol, and every year there are hundreds of cases of accidental homicide because somebody did not know that his revolver was loaded." The new law — or is it to be a constitutional amendment? — will do away with all that. "It will not be easy," of course, "to draw a law that will permit exceptions for public officers and bank guards" — to say nothing of Prohibition agents and other such legalized murderers. "But soon even these officials may get on without revolvers."



The new law that it advocated, indeed, is one of the most absurd specimens of jackass legislation ever heard of, even in this paradise of legislative donkeyism. Its single and sole effect would be to exaggerate enormously all of the evils it proposes to put down. It would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men. The gunman today has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation's proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.

Here I do not indulge in theory. The hard facts are publicly on display in New York State, where a law of exactly the same tenor is already on the books — the so-called Sullivan Law. In order to get it there, of course, the Second Amendment had to be severely strained, but the uplifters advocated the straining unanimously, and to the tune of loud hosannas, and the courts, as usual, were willing to sign on the dotted line. It is now a dreadful felony in New York to "have or possess" a pistol. Even if one keeps it locked in a bureau drawer at home, one may be sent to the hoosegow for ten years. More, men who have done no more are frequently bumped off. The cops, suspecting a man, say, of political heresy, raid his house and look for copies of the Nation. They find none, and are thus baffled — but at the bottom of a trunk they do find a rusted and battered revolver. So he goes on trial for violating the Sullivan Law, and is presently being psychoanalyzed by the uplifters at Sing Sing.

With what result? With the general result that New York, even more than Chicago, is the heaven of footpads, hijackers, gunmen and all other such armed thugs. Their hands upon their pistols, they know that they are safe. Not one citizen out of a hundred that they tackle is armed — for getting a license to keep a revolver is a difficult business, and carrying one without it is more dangerous than submitting to robbery. So the gunmen flourish and give humble thanks to God. Like the bootleggers, they are hot and unanimous for Law Enforcement.

http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/2nd_Amend/uplifters_try_it_again.htm

From the sound of it, its classic Menckin. I never liked his anarchism, but alwasy apreacheated even in less enlightened times a man who would elenquently condem the nonsense of his age.

For more on him look here:

http://www.beachonline.com/menken.htm

http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/

And on that page he prophizes on the drug war in The American Mercury:

Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.

Here is a listing of quotations from him:

http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/megaquotes.html

[beevul]

1. That article sounds

eerily familiar to whats going on in society in many ways.
Both with guns, and with the drug war.

[jhfenton]

2. Some things never change.

Stupidity is particularly persistent.

[Liberal Classic]

3. Good prohibition era essay.

Prohibition is an awful flop.

We like it.

It can't stop what it's meant to stop.

We like it.

It's left a trail of graft and slime,

It don't prohibit worth a dime,

It's filled our land with vice and crime.

Nevertheless, we're for it.

--Franklin P. Adams (1931)